Sticking Out Our Gyatt For the Rizzler: Are We Really Slang Fatigued?

From Leetspeak to LOLcats, communication through internet-sourced slang is nothing new. Still, it has never been as pervasive and overwhelming in its variety as it is today. No longer is it the preserve of subcultures or age groups but, rather, seen as distinctly of them.

The namedropping has reached unbearable levels. Engagement farming video creators make “brainrot quizzes” that challenge their audience to match the meme or action to their specific jargon. Viral love songs take the entirety of their lyrics from various words found on the internet, celebrating “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler.” 

This vernacular even reaches further than social media: in Australia a month ago, Senator Fatima Payman made headlines for her brainrot-influenced speech supposedly engineered to appeal to the younger voters and “sigmas of Australia,” with insistencies such as “this goofy ahh government is capping.” 

The overpowering effect of it all is neatly summarized in a recent iteration of the long-running meme format Shinji in a Chair; the Neon Genesis Evangelion character sits with his head in his hands with nearly sixty different meme words and catchphrases from the past couple of years floating around him… We've come a long way from All Your Base Are Belong to Us.

When it comes to internet slang “overwhelm,” there are a couple of different types that can be pointed to. The first of these are the words and phrases frequently used to (self)identify certain groups of digital natives. It is generally associated with age, particularly Gen Alpha and the younger side of Gen Z, as part of a cultural change begun by the runaway success of Skibidi Toilet. However, it can also be used to divide people along the lines of gender and sexuality. More and more internet users are translating between internet slang subgenres with the differences between “straight male” phrases and that of girls, gays, and theys ("you cooked = ate"). As much as anything, they are representations of different communication styles, a written or verbal stim that shapes the outward personality of an individual. 

The second is a more equal opportunities kind of coinage associated more with specific feelings or mindsets. They often act as a part of the vernacular that helps to label people as parts of certain groups, but they can also be standalone concepts with their own mission. This encompasses the big summer trends of Brat and Demure, but they can also be smaller, e.g., “loud budgeting.” They are most often associated with TikTok influencers trying to make a point that their viewers can easily remember; Vox journalist Rebecca Jennings deems this kind of slang “trendbait”, i.e., the kinds of language that people innovate in the hopes of going viral.

The reality is that these often meaningless words and phrases all act as a form of branding—conscious or not. They are a way of differentiating behaviors and social groups into easy-to-typecast packages, passwords of sorts that pretty much anybody can attempt to use to let themselves into the club. Although they seem to promise a certain exclusivity and are given much more authority when used by those who invented them, they are a form of entry into the worlds they describe as much as they seem like a means to obfuscate them—something that is more intentional at the point of access with a phrase created in the hopes of TikTok engagement, but nonetheless viable for the kinds of language that offer a useful way of defining the next influential generations. 

As internet slang has achieved more mainstream importance, the meme culture that supports its proliferation has become a different beast from the rarified and countercultural example it set when it felt like less power emanated from our screens. The ways in which these dialects have found themselves used have not been so normalized until this moment, which quickly takes away their novelty but also prolongs their impact and the potential influence they can generate for their creator and any consumer brands that can jump on the concept fast enough for it to feel fresh.

We only have to look to Hailey Welch, aka “Hawk Tuah Girl,” who has in a matter of months launched a career of public appearances and a podcast using her viral phrase. While the apparatus of modern social media means it doesn't take long to tire of a phrase these days, the mileage it gives such things allows for it to be even more versatile for its followers and lucrative for its creators.

At this point in time, older generations of social media users have seen many waves of trends come and go with increasing speed, and younger ones have become used to a meme's lifespan being dictated simply by whether or not it's easy to replace. Under a Twitter screenshot of the “I hate being 13” Reddit post, there's an older screenshot of a Reddit-using high schooler in the 2010s complaining about being forced to “do the Fortnite dance”. The willingness to assimilate to these trends has been around for longer than many give it credit for, and despite the protestations, our appetite for it has only grown. The apparatus that facilitates it pushes it onto a much wider audience than could have been dreamed of previously. 

Whether demarcating the line between the youth and the not-youth or propping up the viral aspirations of a small-time influencer, these kinds of language make us presume that there is a mythical group of people out there who are born into the “brainrot” instead of just assimilating to it. Yet, the reality is that it is that this cultural vein is perpetuated through a collective effort. The importance of the slang is as much who takes an interest in it as who creates it. For all we may feel in over our heads, it's only a representation of a world that we feel a need to understand.